Brookfield Wins DOE Paducah Site for $100B AI Campus Plan

A hundred billion dollar AI campus on the site of a Cold War uranium enrichment plant is the kind of headline that reads like a stretch, but it is what the Department of Energy has now put in motion. According to Data Center Knowledge, the DOE selected Brookfield following its November 2025 Request for Offers to lease land and develop a campus at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, with NextEra Energy signed on to build the dedicated power.

The scale numbers are the interesting part. The partnership targets more than 1.2 GW of compute capacity, and the site could support up to 1.8 GW of utility-delivered capacity by 2032. NextEra plans up to 2 GW of natural gas generation and up to 2.6 GW of battery energy storage as on-site power. Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt framed the site as 'the seed of our plan to invest $100 billion in AI infrastructure.' NextEra chairman and CEO John Ketchum called it 'a proof point for how AI infrastructure should be built in America,' stressing that 'the data center will bring its own power, pay for its own power infrastructure.'

The bring-your-own-power framing is the pressure point on every large data center in the country right now. Utilities are running out of interconnection headroom and ratepayers are pushing back on subsidising hyperscaler load, so Energy Secretary Chris Wright leaned into exactly that, calling the plan a 'crucial roadmap for future projects' that reveals 'the ability to build world-leading infrastructure without passing costs on to surrounding communities.' Our climate tracker crossed 500 local data-center bans and moratoria this weekend, which is the pressure this structure is built to answer. The coalition estimates roughly 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent operations roles, which is the local political story.

The nameplate numbers deserve a squint. Neil Osnato, founder of Persistence Analytics Group, told the outlet that 'a gigawatt of battery capacity is not the same thing as a gigawatt of continuously available generation,' and that he would not simply 'add those resources together and call it 4.6 GW of equivalent firm generation.' The release does not name a construction start date, an initial operations date, an anchor tenant, or the shape of the deal with the three named local utility partners, Big Rivers Electric Power Corporation, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative and Paducah Power System. The whole thing is also subject to definitive agreements and regulatory approvals, so take the timeline as directional rather than settled.

For anyone tracking where the next wave of large AI campuses actually gets sited, the interesting thing is the model. A federally owned brownfield, a private developer, a merchant power partner, and a stack of local utilities stitched into one project is the template other DOE sites will now be measured against.